Conventionally, in order to improve the fluid drawing properties of nonwoven fabrics and suppress remaining fluid therein, various ideas have been devised relating to the types of fiber mixed into nonwoven fabrics or the structure of nonwoven fabrics.
For example, with respect to an absorbent article in which a nonwoven fabric is disposed as a second sheet between a fluid-permeable surface sheet and a fluid-retaining absorbent body, it is an issue that fluid on the surface sheet is easily drawn inside the second sheet (good fluid drawing properties), and that the drawn fluid moves to the absorbent body without remaining in the second sheet (suppressing remaining fluid).
Accordingly, an absorbent article has been proposed whose second sheet (fluid-permeable sheet) has a multi-layer structure in which a first layer positioned on a side close to the absorbent body contains high heat-shrinkable fiber (coiled fiber) and an average fiber density of the first layer is higher than an average fiber density of a second layer positioned on a side close to the surface sheet (for example, see JP-A-2004-33236).